The American Interest has reviewed Hungary’s democratic deficit four times this year: Charles Gati’s essay, “Hungarian Rhapsodies”; Francis Fukuyama’s “Do Institutions Really Matter?” and his “What’s Wrong with Hungary?” (these two posts prompted an outburst of some 800 responses, mainly from angry Hungarian readers defending the government of Viktor Orbán and its policies); and finally Ambassador Andras Simonyi’s concluding note.
Condemnation by various international bodies in Europe and negative reporting in the world press indicate that even some of most severe critics of early 2012 were unduly hopeful about the prospects for positive change to the direction of Hungary’s politics. Orbán’s nationalist, right-wing regime has used the past year not only to cement its authority at home but also to reorient the country’s foreign policy as well. While a member of both NATO and the European Union (Hungary is the greatest per capita beneficiary of the EU’s cohesion fund), Orbán and his followers have spoken out against Brussels, the IMF and the United States, too, asserting repeatedly that Hungary will not be a colony of outsiders.
One special target is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who has been attacked for penning a pair of diplomatic notes urging Orbán to reverse his country’s slide toward authoritarianism. Her carefully phrased notes—clear but polite—stressed in particular the imperative of enacting an electoral law in line with Hungary’s multiparty tradition; they fell on deaf ears. The elections of 2014 are expected to be free, but the opposition parties will start with a sixty-meter handicap in a 100-meter dash. Unlike other power-hungry leaders elsewhere in the world who find ways to get around democratic constitutions and laws, Orbán has used his two-thirds majority in parliament to pass a completely new constitution as well as new laws so that he could claim to proceed on the basis of legitimate authority.
Orbán’s foreign policy, run by loyal and youthful aides, defies easy characterization. Despite offensive rhetoric against the EU and the IMF, he has not cut Hungary’s ties with either institution. He has said that “there’s life outside the Union”, and he has had contentious and so far unproductive talks with the IMF about getting a loan. However, he has not yet decided to be the first member of the EU to leave that organization. If he were to do that, it might not be an unpopular move at first, given the nationalistic fervor he has generated. But soon enough, when people realize the huge economic and social benefits Hungary would lose if the EU’s gates were to be less open to Hungarian goods and travelers, the reaction could become highly critical. Meanwhile, Orbán, who used to be a fervent anti-Communist, has sought good relations with and loans from both Russia and China. He explicitly agrees with the declinists’ view of the West; he speaks of an “Eastern wind” to help define Hungary’s orientation. He has gone so far as to assert that Hungarians are “half-Asians” anyway. In his imagination, Hungary is lonely and isolated and therefore it needs a strong state. The word “strong” very frequently appears in his speeches.
One of the themes of the ongoing and bitterly divisive cultural war has to do with the place of Jews in Hungarian society. The poster reproduced above is the product of a small, super-nationalist, pro-Nazi group called Movement for a Pax Hungarica. It upholds the values and tradition of Ferenc Szalasi’s Arrow Cross Party, which ruled Hungary for a few months at the end of World War II. (A war criminal, Szalasi was executed in 1945.) This small paramilitary formation conducts military exercises in the Hungarian countryside and threatens Roma communities and camps. It is also vitriolically anti-Semitic, maintaining that Jews cannot be patriotic Hungarians and therefore should be deported to Israel. Far more popular is Jobbik, a party that is also anti-Roma and anti-Semitic but it is sufficiently clever to make itself palatable to 17 percent of the electorate. It is most unlikely to display posters as offensive as the one reprinted on this page—even if the party’s sentiments are similar in substance, if not in style.
The government, by contrast, pays tribute to the victims of the Holocaust but claims no responsibility for the death of Hungary’s 550,000-600,000 Jews. It claims it was all done by the Germans; after all, almost all Hungarian Jews were deported to concentration camps after March 19, 1944, when Hitler’s armies occupied Hungary. Therefore, it is unimaginable to expect Orbán to deliver the kind of self-critical speech French President Francois Hollande did on July 22, 2012. Referring to the 76,000 French Jews deported to death camps in July 1942, Hollande said: “The truth is that no German soldiers—not a single one—were mobilized at any stage of the operation. The truth is that this crime was committed in France, by France.” Unable to confront the issue of collaboration, Orbán’s government blames the Germans and speaks only of the example of those Hungarians who saved Jewish lives.
This summer, Elie Wiesel, the Hungarian-speaking Romanian Jew from Transylvania, repudiated and returned the high decoration he had received from one of Orbán’s predecessors in 2004. His letter, sent to Laszlo Kover, Orbán’s longtime and probably closest ally and friend, speaks for itself. The broader point is that Hungary under its current government has tired of slow democratic processes and is gradually returning to the interwar pattern of semi-constitutional, authoritarian, nationalist forms of governance. This is well known throughout Europe, but the important countries, notably Germany, are busy with other matters of presumably greater import. And so when the cat’s away, the mice will play. The result: a lot of democratic cheese in Hungary has gone missing.